decline of ancient science

[eugene]

What were the reasons of the decline of ancient science after Aristarchus of Samos?
Somebody can list Galen and Ptolemy, but they were in many aspects compilators.

[Goffredo]

Law of diminishing returns in a complex world. Ideas die out if they don't pick up enough momentum. ideas, in particular science and technology progressed quickly once thresholds were crossed.

Don't make the mistake of looking back from what we now know and think that things could/should have followed a straightforward path. The paths leading from the ancient proto-sciences to what we now know and know how to do were very tortuous (turns, stops, steps backwards, confusion,...).

[SigniferOne]

We have no evidence of the decline of science after Aristarchus. This claim has been repeatedly aired, in precisely the same context as the decline of art after the 4th century BC.

I would put forth Ptolemy, Galen, and Varro as at the forefront of ancient science, in the same way as I would put the Laocoon and the sculptures of Sperlonga (all produced under Tiberius) as at the forefront of ancient art; or the perspectival Second Style paintings as at the forefront of ancient painting.

The only time science begins to decline is in the 3rd century AD and afterwards, when we see a general decline of culture following the civil wars.

Somebody can list Galen and Ptolemy, but they were in many aspects compilators.

Could you perhaps explain in what way somebody like Ptolemy was a compilator? He advanced the principle of epicycles and created the new concept of equants in astronomy; and was the first to map out the whole world according to latitude and longitude in geography. The man was pretty much a giant.

On Roman medicine there are very specific points that can be made.Galen was an expert on neurology, and was one of the first to demonstrate that thinking happened in the brain, which is detailed in a highly specialized study, Galen On The Brain.

As we all know, Galen taught modern Europe medicine, but he himself was taught by a professor he calls Marinus. He writes in Commentary upon 'Nature of Man' VI.k.xv that after Erasistratus no substantial anatomy was done until Marinus and Numisianus (who were his teachers, both Romans). This Marinus seems to have made a number of medical discoveries during the 1st century AD, and Galen quotes an excerpt from Marinus' Treatise On Anatomy, of a description "of the cartilaginous bones of the knee on either side".

Numisianus, according to Galen, had great preeminence in the Greco-Roman medical community during 150s AD, and he writes that as a young student he tried to gain admissions to his lectures in Rome and Corinth (in On the Affectations of the Mind, I.1). This Numisianus wrote multiple books on medicine, including ten books on surgery. These two teachers of Galen himself go back to an even earlier Roman physician Quintus, reputedly of extraordinary reputation during the 1st century AD, constantly referred to by Galen in a graecizing name, "Kointos".

One of the medical mistakes Galen made was believing in the efficacy of bloodletting; this was proven wrong only in the late 19th century. Yet as he records in his book On Bloodletting, he was criticized by the doctors in Rome , who sharply objected to the theory of bloodletting and believed it would not work. Indeed he explains that the existence of his treatise was owed to the very fact of his trying to defend it against their works which were critical of the practice.

Adds John Watson in The Medical Profession in Ancient Times:

Having ventured beyond the limits of the capital, we may remark that many of the physicians who taught or practiced there, had been educated in Asia Minor, in the cities of which were many flourishing though now forgotten schools. The names of several distinguished Roman professors, were associated with Ephesus. Among these was Magnus, a writer on the pulse, and the inventor of theriacae after the manner of Heras and Andromachus. Of this same school were the anatomist Rufus, and the second as well as the third Soranus.